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Six Chix, 5/11/23

So the thing about “sudden,” as a noun, is that it has completely fallen out of use in English outside the set phrase “all of a sudden,” and even when it was in use there wasn’t any particularly strong syntactical or grammatical reason why it took an indefinite article in that phrase rather than a definite one, so it’s pretty natural for modern-day speakers to start reanalyzing and rearranging the phrase, and as long as people know what you mean it’s hard to say you’re doing it “wrong.” Still, some people care a lot about being right in linguistic matters; I found this out the hard way when I got into a discussion on the comments of this very blog in which I pointed out that “none” is not a contraction for “not one” and has always been used in both the singular and plural, with recorded uses of “none are” going back to Chaucer, and this caused one commenter to melt down at me and then quit the site altogether. I have my own odd things I’m overly attached to, of course, but at least none of them have me visualizing myself as an angry pulsing green blob holding the line against a bunch of purple blobs that look pretty chill, honestly.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/11/23

Now I’m imagining the elaborate beehive coif Snuffy had to create to fit his new hair under his hat so that nobody could catch even a glimpse of it while he dashed from his home to this cave, presumably so he wasn’t immediately burned at the stake for engaging in witchcraft. Granny Creeps is powerful enough, or helps enough leading citizens of the Holler with her potions, to avoid that fate herself, but a local layabout and troublemaker like Snuffy is the sort of person who might be made an example of.

Mary Worth, 5/11/23

There’s not a lot about Dr. Jeff I find particularly worthy of praise or envy, but despite being a core Mary Worth character he seems to not put a ton of effort into keeping up with Wilbur’s sex life, and you have to respect that.

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Six Chix, 4/22/23

I feel like there are few more depressing sentences in the English language than “cake is biodegradable,” which implies that these people aren’t going to eat this delicious cake but are rather just going to leave it out in this open field to slowly rot. These are (I think?) children and the cake is almost as big as they are, so it’s unrealistic to expect them to eat all of it, but still, it’s quite melancholy. I suppose it’s supposed to be the Earth Day equivalent of that time a British train museum tossed a chocolate cake into a locomotive’s firebox for its 145th birthday, but like, a lot less fun.

Rhymes With Orange, 4/22/23

A lot of strips did Earth Day jokes today, and I spent quite a while trying to figure out if this was one of them, but I don’t think it was! I think it’s just a strip asking us to contemplate whether a bird cleaning the food out of a crocodile’s teeth is an erotic experience, for either party.

Mary Worth, 4/22/23

If you were at a karaoke studio and a visibly angry man got on stage and announced “This song is dedicated to me … because I need to hear this!”, how excited would you be for what was about to happen, on a scale from 10 to some kind of number that’s so large that only our most powerful computers could even generate it?

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Hi and Lois, 3/26/23

Hi, you are … 45 years old, tops? You are probably never going to become a famous guitar player but you absolutely can still write a novel and, since the main barrier stopping most people from travelling around the world is money, as a comfortably middle-class adult you are probably closer to achieving that dream than you’ve ever been in your life. Are you … are you dying, Hi? Are you dying soon? Is this your way of softening the blow when you tell Lois that she’s about to be widowed?

Beetle Bailey, 3/26/23

I’m sorry, I didn’t speak up loudly enough years back when Beetle Bailey eased into its ongoing “Beetle and Miss Buxley are dating, by the way,” thing, and I strongly feel like I have to nip this in the bud. The whole point of the dynamic between Sargents Snorkel and Lugg is that she’s into him and it’s not reciprocated. I don’t care what headcanon you have about it — that he’s gay and secretly in love with Beetle, or that he’s asexual, or that he’s straight and interested in a relationship in general but simply doesn’t have romantic feelings for her — but doing a whole strip where Sarge really puts forth a lot of effort to be appealing on a date with her is a direct affront to every longtime Beetle Bailey reader.

Family Circus, 3/26/23

Jeffy is definitely puking his guts out all over the bed, right? That’s the joke here? That Billy got distracted and now Jeffy is plastering their room with barf?

Six Chix, 3/26/23

It’s springtime, everyone! Thought about beautifying your home by tearing a family apart lately?